報告書（和文，英文）

当報告の内容は、それぞれの著者の著作物です。
Copyrighted materials of the authors.
「アフリカ史叙述の方法にかんする研究」（2013 年度第 2 回研究会）
日時：2013 年 7 月 6 日（土）13：00 - 18：00
場所：本郷サテライト 7 階会議室
報告者 1：栗田禎子（千葉大学）
報告タイトル：「スーダンなきあとに『スーダン史』は可能か？―『スーダン史』
脱構築／再構築をめざして―」
報告者 2：Frederick Cooper (New York University)
報告タイトル：”Writing African History in a Time of Liberation and Beyond
報告 1 栗田禎子「スーダンなきあとに『スーダン史』は可能か？―『スーダン史』脱構築／再
構築をめざして―」
2011 年 7 月の南スーダン分離独立をもって、1956 年以来存在していた「スーダン」（スーダ
ン共和国）という国家の枠組みは消滅した。これにより、「スーダン人」「スーダン・ナショ
ナリズム」、あるいは「スーダン史」といった概念自体が、根本的な見直しを迫られていると
言える。本報告では、いわば「スーダンなきあとにスーダン史研究はあり得るのか」という問
題に、暫定的問いを与えようとする試みである。
「スーダン史」を捉え直す際にまず重要と思われるのは、「スーダン」を固定的・静態的に
捉えるのではなく、むしろ１９世紀以来、そこでコロニアリズム（およびそれに対する民衆の
たたかい）が展開してきた「場」として動態的に捉えることである。注目すべきなのは、スー
ダンにおける支配や抵抗が、絶えず同国を取り巻く、より広い地域的広がりにおける動向と密
接不可分に連動してきたことであり、この文脈で、特に 19 世紀から 1940 年代にかけての反帝国
主義闘争においては「ナイル河谷」（エジプトおよびスーダン）という概念が決定的重要性を
持った。また 20 世紀後半以降のスーダン史を考える際には、そのアメリカの中東・アフリカ戦
略のなかでの位置づけ（＝「コンゴ革命の北の門」）や、「アフリカの角」といった概念が重
要になる。スーダンの歴史は、より広い、中東・アフリカ全体におけるコロニアリズムの展開
の中に絶えず位置づけ直す形で捉えられねばならない。
同時に重要なのは、現在のアフリカの多くの国同様、スーダンは植民地主義的征服・支配の
過程でこそ形成された国家であり、植民地主義的な支配・被支配の関係（中心＝周辺構造）を
その内部に埋め込まれ、植民地主義をいわば内在化したとも言える、「コロニアル国家」であ
るということである。先に、「スーダン史」を捉え直すにあたり、より広い地域広がりに目配
りし、「スーダン」をいわば「外」に向かって開く必要性に触れたが、この文脈では、逆にス
ーダンの「内」に向かう視線、「スーダン」を一枚岩の存在として捉えるのではなく、その内
部に存在する中心＝周辺関係（「内国植民地状況」）を捉える視座が重要となる。これは言う
までもなく、従来ともすればエリート中心に描かれてきた｢スーダン・ナショナリズム｣の内容
を再検討すること、さらにはイギリス支配からの独立（1956 年）後の現代スーダン国家が抱え
てきた矛盾を直視することと直結している。
上記のような問題意識に基づいてスーダン史を脱構築した上で、これをいわば「下から」再
構築しようとする試みは、過去十数年間、（国家の抜本的民主化をめざす政治運動とも連動す
る形で）スーダン国内でも粘り強く行なわれてきた。本報告の報告者もこうした動きに触発さ
れながら、スーダンにおける反帝国主義闘争の歴史を「下から」捉え直す試みを、特にこうし
1
た運動（19 世紀末のマフディー運動や第一次大戦後の「1924 年革命」など）におけるスーダン
国内の「周辺化された諸地域」（もしくはこれらの地域出身者．具体的には奴隷出身者とな
る）の役割に焦点を合わせる形で行なってきた。
「周辺化された地域」の代表格とも言える存在であった南部の分離独立、「南スーダン」成
立という展開は、しかしながら、上記のようなアプローチに内在するある種の危険性を示すも
のともなっている。「周辺化された地域」に焦点を当てた歴史叙述は、それがそれ以外のさま
ざまな民主的運動と取り結ぶ関係を捨象して行なわれるならば、「アイデンティティー・ポリ
ティクス」を称揚・煽動する言説にたやすく転化する。今なお中東・アフリカを取り巻くコロ
ニアルな構造のなかでは、それは「宗教」「エスニシティー」別の対立・分断を引き起こすこ
とで地域に対する帝国主義的支配を再編しようとする「国際社会」の動きを利する機能も持つ
であろう。
報告者自身は、今後スーダン史の研究を続けるにあたり、①「周辺化された諸地域」（ある
いはその出身者）の動きに注目しつづけると共に、②それ以外の諸勢力・運動との関係性に注
意すること、特に（独立後のアフリカの国家において、いわば形を変えて続けられる反帝国主
義闘争とも言える）民主化運動、労働運動、女性運動等の重要性を認識すること、③（②とも
関連するが）「反乱」「蜂起」といった武装闘争ばかりに着目するのではなく、非暴力的なさ
まざまなたたかいの歴史・系譜にも注意すること、そして、④今に至るまで中東・アフリカ地
域のゆくえを規定し続けている要因としてのコロニアリズムの問題を忘れないこと、を今後の
指針としたいと考えている。
2
報告 2
Frederick Cooper
”Writing African History in a Time of Liberation and
Beyond”
The trajectory of African history as a field of study closely follows the trajectory of
Africa from a continent of colonies to a continent of independent states. Both these histories
are recent. Most African countries became independent between 1957 and 1965, and it was
from the mid-1960s that African history began to be taught in universities in the United
States, Great Britain, and France.
An important transition took place in the career of one of the first Africans to receive
a Ph.D. in history. Kenneth Onwuka Dike studied "imperial history" at the University of
London. In his book of 1956 book, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, he made a case for
a new, Africa-centered approach to history, while still drawing on the legitimacy of archival
research that has mentors in London had taught him. In the preface to his book, he made a
plea for looking at African history in African terms, and in the text he demonstrated how
African institutions interacted with British merchants and consuls.
The publications of Roland Oliver, Philip Curtin, and Jan Vansina in the 1960s mark
the break from an imperial history to African history in the English speaking world. In
French-speaking academia, the pioneers of an Africa-centered history–also emerging out of
an earlier tradition of French actions overseas--were Yves Person, whose chef-d'oeuvre was
published in 1968 and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, who received her doctorate in 1970.
The existence of African history as a field is short enough that my own career spans
most of it, including its twists and turns. Rather than pretending to be eternally youthful, I
want to give a frank old man's talk, a mix of reminiscence and scholarly engagement. I can
speak as a witness, not just as an historian.
The first course I took on Africa was in 1967 when I was a student at Stanford
3
University, and I had the good luck–which I was not at the time able to appreciate–to have
taken this course from a political scientist named David Abernethy, who was engaged in
something young scholars are supposed to do: attacking the paradigm of his mentors. At this
time, that meant modernization theory. But more important, 1967 was the beginning of the
Biafran war, it was one year after the coup d'état in Ghana that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah,
so anyone studying Africa then had to come to grips not only with changing scholarly
fashions but with changing Africa, particularly the shattering of illusions about the
inevitability of progress in the aftermath of decolonization. Historians were then a little
behind political scientists. They were trying to explain to their colleagues that Africa really
had a history, that was not a world of timeless culture
But what was the relationship between theoretical reconfigurations and social and
political change at the time? Knowledge, historians and philosophers of science tell us, is
nested in society. That means in relations of power, including the structures of scientific and
university communities, but also relations of power in the world. African studies and African
politics were linked. But the link was complex. It was not as simple as western scholarship
being the handmaiden of imperialism. On the contrary, John Lonsdale, a distinguished
historian of Kenya, described in 1981 students of Africa as the "Committee of Concerned
Scholars for a Free Africa."
That nicely describes my own attraction to studying Africa as a young person in the
late 1960s. I was a student during the Vietnam war and became increasingly interested in
movements for emancipation from oppressive governments. My thinking, unimpeded by
knowledge, was that southeast Asia was in bad state because of US imperialism and Latin
America was in a bad way because of its class structure. But Africa, having repudiated a
colonial past, seemed like a tabula rasa–young nations, young leaders, mobilized populations.
And behind it all, at a time when the US Civil Rights movement was in the news, was racial
4
liberation.
Here is where one must understand the context in which modernization theory became
attractive during the 1960s. It is easy to dismiss it as a cold war ideology, as imposed
Americanization. That's not wrong, but it's one dimension. Behind the theory–most explicitly
in the work of Talcott Parsons, applied to Africa by David Apter and many others--was the
idea of a grand, global transition from tradition to modernity. Modernizers believed that the
key variables in society moved together: transitions from subsistence to market economy,
from extended to nuclear families, from hierarchical status systems to achievement-oriented
status systems, from religious to secular world views, from ascriptive to participatory
political systems. Modernization in Africa was possible because colonial rule had fallen, and
it implied that the future was open to black people, not just whites.
African leaders themselves talked a language of modernization, even if it was
sometimes complemented by evocations of cultural authenticity. A modern political party
would lead a nation to economic growth; education was one of the top priorities of most early
independence-era governments; most governments distanced themselves from chiefs as
embodiments of status-bound culture and collaboration with colonial regimes; instead some
mix of democratic politics and a vanguard party would carry the nation forward.
Much later, after research in colonial archives, I argued that there was an implicit
modernization theory that developed in French and British administrations during the late
1940s and 1950s. Having to find a new basis for legitimacy–and needing colonies to become
more productive–they convinced themselves that their prior emphasis on the peculiarity of
African society was no longer viable. Instead, if one acted as if the African was just like
anyone else, perhaps he would become so. In thinking about wage labor, for example, British
and French officials wanted to fit Africans into the general, cultureless category of worker. A
working class had to be separated from the backward countryside–that is from all that was
5
African about social life. Such ideas originated in the colonial bureaucracy even before they
were formalized in the social sciences by in the late 1950s. As Britain and France realized
that such projects were not only too expensive but gave rise to as much conflict as they
appeased, the modernization idea allowed officials to convince themselves that Africans
would continue to seek western-style institutions even in their absence. Decolonization made
sense in a modernization framework; earlier, when Africa was seen as a continent of tribes, it
was unimaginable to European elites that Africans could govern themselves.
What is important about the modernization paradigm in the 1960s was its multiple
uses. African trade unionists and politicians seized on the arguments of development-minded
officials: if you want us to be like a modern, European worker, they said, pay us like one.
Give our children good schools. For officials, modernization meant new means of control,
but for for social and political movements modernization meant demands–ultimately
demands for equality in every dimension of social life.
For young social scientists after World War II, like the French anthropologist Georges
Balandier, such ideas had yet another meaning: a way out of the stifling rigidities of colonial
structures. Balandier's trajectory is interesting. He went from France to Senegal in the late
1940s to do a traditional anthropological study of fishermen. But in Dakar he met African
intellectuals and discovered an Africa his teachers had not told him about. He learned about
their political activism, their criticisms of colonial government. In 1951 he published an
essay that treated colonial society the way anthropologists might have treated an Africa tribe,
whose social structure was based on force and whose culture on racism.
But Balandier didn't follow through on that approach. He became fascinated with
African cities and the complex, often unintended, effects of government policy's to shape a
modern urban society. He lost interest in analyzing how colonial societies functioned,
because he saw them being replaced by something else, something more interesting
6
sociologically. Other scholars–like W. Arthur Lewis, himself from the British West Indies–
developed theories of economic modernization. Lewis was also a critic of colonialism, and
he saw that if Africans got rid of it, their societies could converge toward a European
standard of living and a European way of doing things. Other scholars, including Balandier,
were skeptical of convergence, more concerned with the dislocations of social change and the
inventiveness of Africans moving between different worlds.
There was yet another vision of modernization among theorists and policy makers,
particularly in the US. They saw the end of colonial rule and modernization as possibly
bringing about convergence toward western models, but also opening the door to communist
movements or intrigue by the Soviet Union or Communist China. Walter Rostow's 1960
book Stages of Growth theorized this approach in a way that was on one level quite abstract–
universalistic patterns of social and economic change–and on another quite specific, as its
subtitle made clear, A Noncommunist Manifesto. But even this cold war version of
modernization reflected a repudiation of colonialism and of racism: everyone could and
should become modern. The question was would they would be modern in the right way.
By the time I took my first political science course in 1967, two more strands were
emerging. One was a pessimistic variant of modernization theory, exemplified by Samuel
Huntington: many societies were not capable of modernizing, he asserted, and failure was
dangerous. The US and its friends had to be vigilant–and in some cases repressive.
Huntington practiced what he preached, advising the US military in Vietnam and
dictatorships in Brazil and South Africa. The second tendency was the one my professor,
David Abernethy, exemplified: a critique within the methodologies of his discipline. Such an
argument was based on the critical potential within positivist social science. Theories are
supposed to be falsifiable; empirical research at that time was valued within political science.
Some students of politics were finding that the convergence of Africa and the West predicted
7
by modernization theory was not occurring. Economic growth was not producing, for
example, secularism or participant politics. Traditional elites could use modern technologies.
Indeed, neither tradition nor modernity could be defined in a consistent and non-tautological
manner.
There were, of course, many scholars and policy makers who stuck to modernization
theory: too much was at stake intellectually and politically. In other words, scholars'
engagement with social theory in the 1960s was not uniform. People could read a theory in
different ways: as a claim on resources, as a way of organizing the conflict with communism,
as a means to analyzing society in a post-colonial situation. Modernization theory remained
attractive even when it could not explain what was happening. And some of its central ideas–
and many of its fallacies–reappeared in the 1990s with the concept of globalization.
What about historians, in this exciting but increasingly problematic period after
independence? Lonsdale's characterization works rather well: historians got caught up in the
project of inventing a usable past for new, free nations. When I was in graduate school, that
meant two things: studying precolonial history, particularly of a kingdom or of an ethnic
group, and studying resistance to conquest. Colonial history was out; it was too white. South
Africa was marginal too. We were, it seems, following the Nigerian historian Jacob Ajayi's
dictum that colonialism was "an episode in African history," no more important than any
other, an interlude between two periods when Africa was independent. Colonialism had
denied that Africans had a history, and the mere fact of doing African history put one on the
side of progress. Or so it seemed.
Around 1970, historians in Africa itself took different directions and people began to
speak of two schools. The "Ibadan school," after Nigeria's leading university and inspired by
Ajayi and Dike, fit in the nationalist conception of things, although both these historians were
rather less nationalist in their empirical work than in their pronouncements; both wrote good,
8
solid archive-based books about European-African interaction. The other wing was the "Dar
es Salaam school." It resonated with the more radical turn that Julius Nyerere's government
in Tanzania took after 1967–its rejection of foreign economic models, its embrace of African
socialism, its emphasis on a distinctively African culture. It was, at the same time, the most
cosmopolitan of African schools, having attracted leftist academics, white and black,
including such people as Terence Ranger and most importantly the Guyanese historian and
political activist Walter Rodney, who taught in Dar for several years. Rodney's How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa brought Latin American dependency theory to Africa. The origins of
dependency theory go back to the late 1940s, when Raul Prebisch, working for the Economic
Commission for Latin America, began to publish an alternative analysis to the economic
orthodoxy that presumed that markets optimized economic behavior. He argued that
exchange was fundamentally unequal: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer as terms of
trade increasingly favored manufactured goods over raw materials. When Prebisch first
wrote, development economics was still in its infancy. So there was an anti-orthodoxy
coming out at the same time as an orthodoxy.
The Prebisch thesis came to Africa with Rodney in 1972. The timing was right–not
just because of what scientists were saying to each other, but because African economies
were not following the script toward modernization and development. Political liberation
was not leading to economic liberation, and the reason, in this line of argument, was in the
nature of global capitalism. The roots of underdevelopment extended back even before
colonization, especially to the slave trade. The process created a virtually irreversible
distinction between center and periphery. Colonization made the situation worse but did not
fundamentally change it; nor did decolonization. The alternative was to get out of the world
system.
The Ibadan school focused on the internal nature of African societies, on African
9
agency. The Dar school focused on external constraints. Both schools were calling for the
decolonization of historical knowledge–to get out of modes of thought associated with
European claims to superiority, whether it be to emphasize the autonomy of African forms of
knowledge or to point to the ways in which Africa had become entrapped in a global,
imperialist system. The appeal of one or the other variant wasn't just in Africa. They made
sense to a younger generation of intellectuals in North America and Europe, who wanted to
distinguish itself from their elders, to get at basic truths that had been obscured, to celebrate
liberation where it could be celebrated and to condemn inequality, exploitation, and
repression at whatever level was most relevant.
The Ibadan approach was consistent with what some called "Africanism," an areafocused approach. And here we get to another case of multiple origins and multiple
meanings to scholarly trends. What about area studies–which boomed in the 1960s–in regard
to Asia and Latin America as well as Africa? Area studies has been subject to two
sorts of critiques. One was that it was a cold war notion: the government, not least the
American military, needed to know more about the places it might want to invade. More
basically, one could say that with the end of colonial empires, western institutions needed
new ways of organizing knowledge of the world, to contain the world intellectually if not
militarily. The second critique was that Africanism was a variant on orientalism, an older
European view of Middle Eastern or Asian societies, that stressed their esoteric nature, and
the need for European specialists who understood them. Orientalism and Africanism both
celebrated and condescended to the object of their study.
There were Africanists who fit into one or the other of these conceptions. But there
was a much larger number of scholars from outside Africa who were fascinated by the place,
who were puzzled by it, who wanted to understand and explain. But there was nothing
intrinsic to area studies to say that one had to study only one area. Most Africa specialists
10
also had disciplinary homes and colleagues who used similar methodologies to study other
places–historians, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists. There was some great work
done in the 1960s that was explicitly comparative.
When it comes down to it, the rationale for area studies is that it is good to know
something about someplace. That logic was true in the 1960s and it is true today. If fashion
now dictates that one should study connections, across oceans as well as across continents, so
much the better. But there is no need to exaggerate–area studies was never as insular as its
critics made it out to be. And people who now try to do "global history" without knowing
something about someplace are likely to do it badly.
The limitations of nationally-focused–or even continent-specific–research became
salient not so much through debates internal to the academy as through changes in Africa
itself. The first African governments were not without their accomplishments. The increasing
rates of literacy and the declining rates of infant mortality across much of Africa in the 1960s
and 1970s, both of which owed much to state action, are evidence–even better than GDP
growth--that development had positive effects. African governments had turned development
from a colonial to a national project, but they did not have the resources to fully accomplish a
task that had proved too much for British and French regimes, which had had more resources.
Revolutions in agricultural production proved elusive, and the most ambitious projects for
substituting control by a modernizing state for the supposedly backward usually failed.
Industrialization fell victim to crony capitalism within states and competition from outside–
providing African consumers with inferior products at higher prices and failing to produce
the kinds of linkages that development economists thought would follow. There were
relative success stories–mostly coming from what scholars called "middle peasants"–people
who adapted to the demands of external markets, but did so in their own ways, organizing
economic life in a great variety of ways. African farmers often understood the ecosystems in
11
which they worked better than supposed experts.
But the extent of the problem became evident only when external forces changed the
game: the world depression of the mid-1970s revealed that few African states had produced
the kind of national, self-sufficient economy that leaders had sought. If one can cite
examples of bad policies–such as the damage Nkrumah's government did to the cocoa
economy of Ghana in the 1960s–the longer term problem was that Africans' adaptability to
external markets trapped them a cyclical pattern that few were able to escape. Governments
depended on external connections–import-export revenue as well as foreign aid–for the ruling
elite's welfare, and pushed the externally-oriented nature of the economy as hard as had
colonial regimes beforehand. When the crisis hit, it made African governments even more
extroverted, for their fiscal crises made them dependent on IMF bailouts. The IMF insisted
on conditions that made escape from the vicious cycle even harder, above all cutting
government expenditures for social services. Whatever the IMF was preaching, ruling elites
were more reluctant to give up their patron-client politics than to cut social services;
privitization often meant public goods becoming private goods in the same hands as before.
And conflict for the fruits of controlling resources became more acute as the fruits became
more limited, worsening regional, ethnic, and clan-based rivalries.
The argument that the problem of Africa lay not specifically in colonization, but in
the longer-term development of a capitalist world economy–an idea pioneered at Dar es
Salaam by Rodney–became more pertinent in these circumstances. But with variations. The
debate in the 1970s was about the degree of determination that could be ascribed to the world
economy and the degree to which a path–or different paths–to capitalist development were
taking place in Africa. I witnessed some of the debate in Nairobi, where I spent much of the
academic year 1978-79; it was an exciting time to be there. Kenyan scholars like Peter
Anyang N'yongo, Apolo Njonjo, and Atieno Odhiambo began what became known as the
12
Kenya debate, on the question of whether a class of Kenyans was actually becoming
capitalist. The dependency-oriented school, following Rodney, saw the nearly-complete
domination of foreign capital, with local elites as mere agents. The more classically Marxist
argument focused on control of the means of production. As a byproduct of the land-stealing
by white settlers in the colonial era, a process of capital accumulation in land had taken place
in Kenya more than in other African countries, and since independence, Africans connected
to the regime had moved into the place of whites. They were also using the state to push
their way into industrial and commercial capitalism, through joint partnerships or protected
industries. So while positions in the government were the source of the development of a
capitalist class, the direction of change was toward such a class acquiring the resources to
make private accumulation into a real force.
As in most attempts to understand the real world, the conditions for a decisive
experiment were not present. The time I was in Kenya was not the beginning of a long
debate, but its high point. The debate had begun shortly after the death of Jomo Kenyatta,
Kenya's first president, and it was Kenyatta's cronies–Kikuyu from Kiambu, and only the
well connected among them–who constituted the embryonic capitalist class of the Marxist
theorists. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, not only set about dismantling the Kiambu
political and economic network, but seeing himself threatened, clamped down on dissent
generally. He played a dangerous ethnic politics to keep his rivals unsettled. Because there
were protests at the University of Nairobi, there was a crackdown on independent-minded
faculty, notably the participants in this debate. Some were tortured, others were driven out of
Kenya. And the Moi regime's tactics seemed to resolve the debate in favor of the dependency
argument, not necessarily because of its merits as theory but because the Moi regime
destroyed the budding capitalist class that the Kenyatta regime had started to build. Some
have tried to find other examples of a dynamic form of capitalism in Africa–in Zimbabwe
13
after its liberation for example–that have also proven problematic. The case can still be made
for South Africa, which much more than anyplace else in Africa, produced a racialized
version of capitalist development beginning in the 19th century. After liberation in 1994, it
gave way to a society that is not so neatly divided racially, but is one of the world's most
unequal societies. It has a landless working class that now faces the problem of not having
enough work.
As I’ve argued in my own work, the classic Marxist analysis of how capitalism came
into being–the alienation of the majority from the means of production–is relevant to Africa,
provided one looks at specific trajectories. How does accumulation of the means of
production take place, by what mechanisms, against what countervailing forces, with what
social and political consequences? Theory can help us pose good questions, and it might
suggest that one look for many different answers rather the one answer that fits the entire
world. Arguably one cannot understand capitalism only by understanding its "best" cases.
So what of scholarship in the era of economic crisis and imposed policies of
dismantling the state's role in economic and social development? Wide disagreement,
theoretical as well as empirical. One thread, prevalent among American economists and
international financial agencies, said that Africans were the cause of their own problem.
Governments were corrupt and made bad economic decisions. There was certainly evidence
to support this point of view. The second argument went further: governments should not try
to develop economies but leave change to the market. Economists in that school kept trying
to find a good example of what they called the "miracle of the market." The trouble was most
miracles did not last very long. The Côte d'Ivoire was a favorite example for awhile, until its
economy collapsed in the 1990s.
The opposite argument put the blame on the IMF and the World Bank themselves.
There was a plausible argument that the international financial institutions were seeking less
14
to reform African economies than to write them off as no longer necessary to a capitalist
world economy--and to justify abandoning them to their fate. A few orthodox Marxists
argued that Africa was underexploited. They point to all the surplus labor that was not being
used. Still others tried to fit a new label on old arguments: Africa was the victim of
"globalization" or of "neo-liberalism."
By the late 1980s the question was how African intellectuals, foreign scholars, and
ordinary people could come to understand a crisis that seemed to have no end. Some Africans
called themselves "Afro-pessimists." Some saw Africans giving up on politics and taking
refuge in religion, possibly versions of pentacoastal Christianity that linked failure to a lack
of faith or to the workings of evil forces, and saw material as well as spiritual possibilities if
one lived within a new religious framework. Or might the Islamic brotherhoods of Senegal
offer both a set of meanings and of community that neither states nor a supposedly
modernizing society had to offer? Was there a youth culture growing that knew through
media connections about world-wide cultural trends, but had only indirect access to them,
moving between self-indulgence and nihilism–or creative expression of disillusionment?
More recently, scholars have wondered how they should interpret the export boom in
some African commodities, stimulated by demand from China and India. Some think a new
era of growth is at hand. My historians' instinct is to say–this looks familiar. It sounds like
the 1950s again–development, yes, but driven not by a generalized pattern of growth but by
specific commodity chains, yet another of Africa's many growth spurts. There are signs now
of improved public services and more efficient markets in some countries, but unless one
finds political activism comparable to that of the 1950s, there is a danger that most of the
gains will be appropriated by a small elite, African and foreign.
Africanists shared in the fashions of a wider academic world. One of the favorite
expressions of the 1990s was "cultural turn" or "linguistic turn." These variants expressed a
15
certain desire to get away from economic or sociological determinism, but the "turn"
metaphor seemed to suggest that we were all supposed to follow a route together, and anyone
who didn't take the cultural turn was going down a dead end. Eventually, some leading
scholars published a collection of essays entitled "Beyond the Cultural Turn." Of course the
cultural turn was a reaction to the previous economic turn and the need to get beyond the
cultural turn was another reaction–a U-turn.
The "turns" exemplify one of the problem of academic life, even in a context such as
American universities, where many professors have enough job security to take intellectual
risks. One can call the problem the conformism of the avant garde. While the study of culture
is–and always was–an essential dimension of historical or social science inquiry, cultural
studies tended to privilege a particular stance: that of the critic interrogating cultural objects,
be they literary, visual, musical or whatever. Saying clever things about what the critic
observed got a lot of mileage. It did not tell us what people other than the critic thought of
these objects of study–that took a lot more work.
The irony of the temporary adoption, especially by ex-leftists, of culturalist paradigms
in the 1990s was that a much stronger force was gathering on the right: rational choice theory.
It became–and I fear still is–as hegemonic in political science as cultural studies was in
literature. This isn't the place for a full critique of either tendency, so just let me say that I
think cultural studies and rational choice theory deserve each other. Neither can come to grips
with the actual forms of social or political life.
The good side of scholarly trends toward studying modes of thought and
representations has been a return to some of the questions that Balandier was asking about
colonial societies in 1951, but with a broader conception of how colonial states functioned.
My own work turned in that direction in the late 1980s, in part thanks to a collaboration with
the anthropologist Ann Stoler. We had both written books that started out in the tradition of
16
Marxist political economy, but found that much of the story of agriculture in the early 20th
century did not follow from some impersonal workings of "the economy" but were shaped by
the interventions of colonial states, imposing models and confronting anxieties that had to be
explained. I was by then working on a microstudy of dockworkers in the East African port of
Mombasa and finding that I needed a macroanalysis to make any sense of my microstudy.
The problem of labor in 1940s Mombasa had less to do with Mombasa than with the British
empire. For these reasons, the possibility of thinking about colonialism in comparative and
global perspective was quite appealing. We began a collaboration that resulted in a
conference in 1988 and our edited book Tensions of Empire in 1997.
We were far from alone. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a spate of interest in colonial
questions. Discovering the work of Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash,
and others working on India was eye-opening for me and other scholars, extending modes of
explanation, opening up possibilities of cross-regional comparison. Interestingly, neither
postcolonial theory nor subaltern studies had the influence in African studies that they have
had in South Asian studies. I suspect that the difference lies in different historical
trajectories: India was put together by Moghuls and British to an extent that Africa never was,
and "India" has been more a concept that South Asianists wanted to deconstruct, while
Africans were more concerned with constructing Africa. The critique of modernity took root
among South Asianists in the 1980s and 1990s; Africans were more likely to say, show us a
little modernity, a little development, and we'll tell you whether we like it or not.
Whatever its problems, colonial studies has shown that colonization was no mere
sideshow in the national histories of Great Britain, France, Portugal, or other European
countries, but was an intrinsic part of what made them what they are. At the same time,
colonial studies has pointed to the difficulty of analyzing colonialism using concepts that are
rooted in the colonization process itself. The epistemological critique has had a particularly
17
salutary influence in a situation where paradigms seem to come from the North in rapid
succession, with everybody from the South expected to hop on board. The impact was
institutional as well as intellectual–notably through the organization of SEPHIS to foster
South-South dialogue, CODESRIA to encourage social science research in Africa.
The question is how one is going to use such insights. One tendency has been to push
to a high level of abstraction, to posit "coloniality" as a defining phenomenon of the period
from 1492, when Columbus "discovered" America, until the present. The aim of such a
move is to break into the narrative of progress, centered on Europe, and to show that over and
above any specific historical trajectory lies the dark side of progress. Such a move has its
uses, but also its weaknesses. It deprives of all agency not only colonized peoples, but the
colonizers, who are merely embodying a script that was written by nobody in particular.
And while the broader trend of historical scholarship that focuses on and criticizes
Eurocentrism, one has to watch out for a tendency to reproduce Eurocentrism with the values
inverted–no longer the agent of progress, but the determinant of what is wrong with the world.
But can one, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty's book title, provincialize Europe? The contents
of Chakrabarty's book goes in the opposite direction of the title–to suggest that one cannot
provincialize, except in certain bounded domains of life, because Europe has set the terms in
which we consider all such questions. But I think one can provincialize Europe–as long as
one accepts that the problem of deploying the categories of late 20th social science isn't just
that they don't fit Africa or Asia but that they don't work for Europe either.
I had the benefit of an in-house critique on the limits of colonial studies, from my
spouse and colleague Jane Burbank, a specialist in Russian history, who complained quite
correctly about two features of the colonial studies project in which I was participating: that it
was limited to third and first worlds, forgetting about the second, and that it was relentlessly
modernist, paying little attention to anything before the 19th century, except for some who
18
assimilated everything since 1492 into the same category. It was in response to these
considerations that Jane and I, with support from the University of Michigan, initiated a
graduate seminar alongside a speaker series in 1999-2000 on the theme of "empires, states,
and political imagination." The last phrase was an indirect criticism of Benedict Anderson,
whose "Imagined Communities" had revivified an older narrative that put the world on a
relentless and necessary path from empire to nation-state. The work of our seminar
underscored the extent to which imaginations–in Europe as much as elsewhere–were multiple,
some of them persistently imperial.
Enlarging the scope of inquiry beyond the specific form of the colonial empire
permitted a wider engagement with the politics of difference. In most of human history,
people have not lived in homogeneous societies; they have not necessarily been ruled by
people who were "like" them. There are many ways in which polities have dealt with
difference–from treating it as an ordinary fact of life to drawing on different communities to
contribute differently to imperial authority to assimilation to genocide. Difference is not as
simple as black and white–and black and white are not so simple themselves, as recent
studies of racial thought in Great Britain and France by Helen Tilley and Alice Conklin are
making clear.
Studying empires in the wider sense also forces confrontation with the coexistence in
a single time frame of different forms of empire: for example Ottoman and British in the late
19th century, Soviet, Nazi, and French in the 1930s. And it raises questions about the
apparent–quite recent and quite problematic–generalization of the nation-state form into the
norm for global political organization, for in the mid-20th century there were different
trajectories out of empire that seemed to be politically possible.
In the 1940s and 1950s–and this is the object of my current research–few French
African politicians thought turning individual colonial territories into independent nation-
19
states was a viable alternative; they advocated federation among African territories and
confederal relations with France. They sought to turn colonial subjects into French citizens,
with all the rights that went along with that status. African politicians took advantages of
France's weakness after World War II to insist that the Constitution of 1946 extend the rights
of citizens to the empire. Afterward, they turned citizenship into a means of making claims–
for equality in a social as well as political sense with all other French citizens. One reason
why France was willing to give up its colonies was that demands for equality were proving
too effective and too costly. And while French leaders tried and failed to maintain former
colonies within a wider structure that would remain French, they decided they liked the idea
of confederation for themselves–but with other European states, not with African territories.
Before Europe, French leaders had tried to create "Eurafrica," combining two sorts of
connections beyond the nation–with former colonies and with other European states. The
failure of Eurafrica has left a wall around Europe that keeps out the sons and daughters of
people France had once tried to keep inside its imperial borders.
The European Union is not the only example of a post-imperial structure that looks
beyond the nation-state. When the Soviet empire broke up in 1991, the biggest part of it
became the Russian Federation, recognizing within it different nationalities, themselves the
products of a long history of political imagination, within specific regions, across the vast
steppes once dominated by the Mongols, by the expansionist tsarist state, and within the
system of national republics put in place by the USSR. We can also ask about the enduring
effects of the imperial trajectories of the United States–which did occupations often and
colonizations rarely–and China, where the space that goes by that name today was defined by
the Yuan and Qing dynasties and where the integration of Tibetans and Muslims remains a
difficult question.
Will there be limitations and blind-spots in casting the net this wide? Yes. And the
20
entire subject may get tiresome in a few years. But a great deal of interesting work is now
being done on the co-existence of multiple empires; the recent boom in Ottoman studies for
example has countered the tendency to see the 19th and early 20th century versions of this
empire as a weird anachronism, as if its leaders should have known they were obsolete. After
all the Ottoman empire lasted 600 years. The British or French empires in Africa, more like
80. Maybe there are ways of provincializing Europe within the long sweep of history.
I've traced theoretical shifts, mostly focused on Africa, over the course of a single
professor's hopefully not completed career, one person's intellectual life over a 45 year period.
As you see, there were many different ways of thinking about Africa in play, some directly
opposed, some overlapping, some adjusting subtly to new perspectives. All of them existed
in the world–in a politics of academic knowledge related in ways that are not easy to analyze
to a politics of international relations, of unequal economic relations, of elite consolidation
and fragmentation within African countries, of people making careers, of people trying to
make sense of things that puzzle them. African history over the past 50 years or so has had to
confront the fact that much of the world was changing fundamentally, and no-one knew how
the story would turn out. We bring our empirical knowledge and theoretical training to solve
puzzles, but we still run into issues that we do not understand at all. One of the biggest
dangers scholars face is conformism, thinking that everyone has to jump on the latest
bandwagon. Empirical rigor and theoretical engagement are only part of what makes
scholarship interesting and useful. The other important ingredient is imagination.
21
Bibliographical Note
This talk draws on and synthesizes work I have been doing over several decades. I
have listed below some of my publications that focus on questions of historiography and
social theory in the study of Africa and colonial situations more generally. They include more
detailed discussions of some of the issues in this talk and references to relevant literature.
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005
(Co-author with Jane Burbank) Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of
Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, forthcoming in 2014
(Co-editor with Ann Stoler). Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
(Co-editor with Randall Packard) International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays
in the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997.
"The Problem of Slavery in African Studies," Journal of African History 20 (1979): 103-25
"Africa and the World Economy," African Studies Review 24, 2/3 (1981): 1-86
"Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," American Historical
Review 99 (1994): 1516-45
"Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The
Examples of British and French Africa." Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Humaines 10
(2004): 9-38.
"Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective." Journal of
African History 49 (2008): 167-96.
"Writing the History of Development." Journal of Modern European History, 8 (2010): 5-23.
"African History/Global History." Perspectives on History December 2012, 37-38.
22